Retired four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal did not mince words about President Donald Trump in a wide-ranging interview with ABC’s “This Week,” saying the president is dishonest and immoral and adding that he could not work for Trump.

“I don’t think he tells the truth,” McChrystal told ABC’s Martha Raddatz who questioned the general on whether he feels Trump is a liar.

When asked if Trump is immoral, McChrystal said: “I think he is.”

Trump slaps his immorality out there on Twitter every day. A moral person doesn’t talk to and about people the way Trump does, especially from a position of power.… Read the rest

White House chief of staff John Kelly, who will depart President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday, told The Los Angeles Times in an extensive interview published Sunday that the president never ordered him to do anything illegal and added that the proposed border wall at the center of the government shutdown fight is not as it has been portrayed.

Listen, he also never sliced people’s arms off with a sword, so good news, right?

Kelly, set to be replaced by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, who will serve as acting chief of staff, said he made sure the president

Here at The New York Times, we have also fact-checked countless campaign rallies, news conferences, interviews and Twitter posts. After nearly two years of assessing the accuracy of Mr. Trump’s statements, we can draw some conclusions not just about the scale of the president’s mendacity, but also about how he uses inaccurate claims to advance his agenda, criticize the news media and celebrate his achievements.

One, he repeats his lies instead of admitting they are lies.

Examples abound. He has falsely characterized the December 2017 tax cuts as the “largest” or the “biggest” in American history over 100 times (several others were larger). He has misleadingly

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Friday freezing federal workers’ pay for 2019, following through on a proposal he announced earlier in the year.

The move, which nixes a 2.1% across-the-board pay raise that was set to take effect in January, comes as hundreds of thousands of federal employees are expecting to begin the new year furloughed or working without pay because of a partial government shutdown.

Trump told lawmakers he planned to scrap the 2019 pay bump for federal workers in August, saying the federal budget couldn’t support it. In addition to the 2.1% pay increase, the executive order also cancels a yearly adjustment of paychecks based on the region of the country

In his first two years in office, President Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of the presidency and the norms of the nation’s capital, casting aside codes of conduct and traditions that have held for generations.

In Trump’s Washington, facts are less relevant. Insults and highly personal attacks are increasingly employed by members of both parties. The White House press briefing is all but gone, international summits are optional, the arts are an afterthought and everything — including inherently nonpartisan institutions and investigations — is suddenly political.

The thing is, though, Trump hasn’t actually rewritten any rules; he hasn’t done anything that thoughtful, and he couldn’t if he wanted to, because … Read the rest

The SDNY’s case has already netted one guilty plea for a felony crime of violating campaign finance laws. In his guilty plea and sentencing allocution, Mr. Cohen stated that he worked “in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” who is widely understood to be the president. In addition, it is clear from the charging documents against Mr. Cohen that the Trump Organization, which was owned and controlled by Mr. Trump and his children at the time of the conduct, is likely implicated in this criminal scheme as well.

President Trump has an uncanny knack for making a mess of simple, traditional functions every other president has managed to carry out with ease. Talk to a child about Christmas? Yikes — a “marginal” disaster. Go to Europe to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I? He skips one event rather than wilt in the rain and sulks through another. The worst anti-Semitic massacre in U.S. history? He whines about getting his hair wet and keeps campaigning. Visit the troops (finally) in Iraq? Oh boy.

Newsweek reports that “oops he revealed the location of a SEAL team on Twitter” item:

President Donald Trump and the White House communications team revealed that a U.S. Navy SEAL team was deployed to Iraq after the president secretly traveled to the region to meet with American forces serving in a combat zone for the first time since being elected to office.

While the commander-in-chief can declassify information, usually the presence of a special operations unit, to include, showing their faces would not be revealed to the American public, especially while the U.S. service members were still deployed. Current and former Defense Department officials told Newsweek that the information is almost always classified and is a violation of operational security.

(1) Trump doesn’t want the public to think the stock market has tanked because of his government shutdown, his trade wars, and the $1.9 trillion increase in the nation’s debt caused by his tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. (Actually, these are major reasons for the market’s drop.)

(2) So he’s blaming the Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell, for raising interest rates. And he’s ordered his staff to find a legal rationale for removing Powell. (Trump has no legal authority to do so.)

(3) Which is spooking investors even more, because they worry Trump will try to infringe on the independence

“I think they understand what’s happening,” he said. “They want border security. The people of this country want border security.”

“It’s not a question of me,” he continued. “I would rather not be doing shutdowns. I’ve been at the White House. I love the White House, but I wasn’t able to be with my family. I thought it would be wrong for me to be with my family, my family is in Florida, Palm Beach, and I just didn’t want to go down and be there when other people are hurting.”

The Christmas Eve grievances billowing from the White House on Monday formed a heavy cloud of Yuletide gloom.

In his third straight day holed up inside the White House during the partial federal government shutdown that he initiated over his demand to construct a border wall, President Trump barked out his frustrations on Twitter: Democrats are hypocrites! The media makes up stories! Senators are wrong on foreign policy — and so is Defense Secretary Jim Mattis!

Wah! Wah! Wah wah wah!

Trump said war-ravaged Syria would be rebuilt not by the United States but by Saudi Arabia. “Thanks to Saudi A!” he tweeted, two weeks after the Senate unanimously rebukedthe kingdom’s crown prince

This morning I phoned my friend, the former Republican member of Congress.

ME: So, what are you hearing?

HE: Trump is in deep shit.

ME: Tell me more.

HE: When it looked like he was backing down on the wall, Rush and the crazies on Fox went ballistic. So he has to do the shutdown to keep the base happy. They’re his insurance policy. They stand between him and impeachment.

ME: Impeachment? No chance. Senate Republicans would never go along.

HE (laughing): Don’t be so sure. Corporate and Wall Street are up in arms. Trade war was bad enough. Now, you’ve got Mattis resigning in protest. Trump pulling out of Syria,

So what caused Trump to flip back? Some have suggested that he bowed to backlash from high-profile conservative pundits — notably Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh — who lambasted the president for appearing to concede on the wall funding.

It may or may not be true, but it’s more plausible than it would be for any other president, even the most corrupt or dim-witted. (Isn’t it interesting that Trump is both crookeder than Nixon and dumber than Reagan and Bush 2? And meaner than anybody ever?)

When President Trump grows frustrated with advisers during meetings, which is not an uncommon occurrence, he sits back in his chair, crosses his arms and scowls. Often he erupts.

He calls his aides “fucking idiots.”

For two years, Mr. Trump has waged war against his own government, convinced that people around him are fools. Angry that they resist his wishes, uninterested in the details of their briefings, he becomes especially agitated when they tell him he does not have the power to do what he wants, which makes him suspicious that they are secretly undermining him.

Trump – of course – is in a snit. Mattis didn’t resign, Trump retroactively fired him after he said he was resigning! So there and ha!

I am pleased to announce that our very talented Deputy Secretary of Defense, Patrick Shanahan, will assume the title of Acting Secretary of Defense starting January 1, 2019. Patrick has a long list of accomplishments while serving as Deputy, & previously Boeing. He will be great!

Aides said that the president was furious that Mr. Mattis’s resignation letter — in which he rebuked the president’s rejection of international allies and his failure to check authoritarian governments — had led to days of

Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, has accelerated his resignation, telling colleagues this weekend that he could not carry out President Trump’s newly declared policy of withdrawing from Syria.

A seasoned diplomat considered by many to be the glue holding together the sprawling, American-led coalition fighting the terrorist group, Mr. McGurk was supposed to retire in February.

According to an email he sent his staff, he decided to move forward his departure after Mr. Trump did not heed his own commanders and blindsided America’s allies in the region by abruptly ordering the withdrawal of the 2,000 troops stationed in Syria.

One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies…

Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent

President Donald Trump has at least twice in the past few weeks vented to his acting attorney general, angered by federal prosecutors who referenced the President’s actions in crimes his former lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Trump was frustrated, the sources said, that prosecutors Matt Whitaker oversees filed charges that made Trump look bad. None of the sources suggested that the President directed Whitaker to stop the investigation, but rather lashed out at what he felt was an unfair situation.

The first known instance took place when Trump made his displeasure clear to acting attorney general Matt Whitaker after Cohen pleaded guilty November 29

First, President Trump blindsided his aides and the rest of the world by deciding to pull the full contingent of some 2,000 American troops out of Syria, helping the Kremlin to confirm Mr. Putin’s gamble that intervening in Syria would revive Russian influence in the Middle East.

Mr. Trump followed that up by declaring that the United States would pull half its forces out of Afghanistan; the combined withdrawals prompted the resignation of Jim Mattis, the respected general who leads the Pentagon.

All that followed Mr. Trump’s already substantial effort to undermine NATO and the European Union by weakening the American commitment to its traditional alliances.

The Democrats are trying to belittle the concept of a Wall, calling it old fashioned. The fact is there is nothing else’s that will work, and that has been true for thousands of years. It’s like the wheel, there is nothing better. I know tech better than anyone, & technology…..